{"id":28444,"date":"2019-08-27T10:59:25","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T09:59:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/?p=28444"},"modified":"2019-08-28T14:11:21","modified_gmt":"2019-08-28T13:11:21","slug":"what-cios-need-to-know-about-cabling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/2019\/08\/27\/what-cios-need-to-know-about-cabling\/","title":{"rendered":"What CIOs need to know about cabling"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What issues do CIOs need to understand and address when it comes to cabling? Nabil Khalil, Executive Vice-President of R&M Middle East, Turkey and Africa, explains all. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across industry verticals and organisations of all scales, Digital Transformation is now imperative for business competitiveness. Applications such as social media and Big Data, new architectures such as dense server virtualisation and IP Storage and the need for mobile access to all applications have placed enormous demands on network infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CIOs must be aware that today\u2019s networks fundamentally differ from the highly over-subscribed, hierarchical and costly legacy solutions of the past. Increased adoption of high-performance servers and applications requiring higher bandwidth are driving adoption of 10 and 25 Gigabit Ethernet switching in combination with 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Nabil Khalil, Executive Vice-President of R&M Middle East, Turkey and Africa<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As a result, it has become increasingly\nnecessary to include network fabrics, Software-Defined Networking,\nhyperconvergence and software defined storage technologies. The introduction of\nVirtual Storage Area Networks (VSAN) and Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is\nchanging network architectures in the enterprise data centre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shifting storage into the server housing\nmeans networks are consolidated. Cabling density increases as a result, both on\nthe server housing and on the switch or router. Increasing virtualisation means\ndata traffic between servers grows. At the same time, there is a further\nincrease in CPU and PCI performance. As a result, data centres must ensure\ntheir networks can cope with using 40 and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From a cabling standpoint, all this has the\npotential to add volumes of complexity which promotes the need for simplicity,\nreliability and high-density. There are several areas for CIOs to focus on to\naddress these cabling needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hyperscale<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hyperscale data centres have an incredibly\nscalable computing architecture which can be managed like a single unit.\nHyperscale solutions allow CIOs to start out modestly with lower investments\nand react to growing demand. They can thus immediately aggregate or extend\ntheir networks smoothly without having to interrupt operations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hyperscale capability is based in\nparticular on there being an available mass of optical fibres. High count fibre\ncables with more than 2000 or 4000 multi fibre cables are typically needed to\ncover the connectivity requirement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fibre Vs. copper<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one asks for a slower network and while\nit is 10GbE that is being deployed, all new implementations are factoring in\nthe need to include easy 40G and even 100G migration as a part of their future.\nAnd for this, higher value cabling systems such as fibre is the way forward.\nFibre systems facilitate the set-up of high-density cabling systems for data\nnetworks with parallel-optical connection technology. Consequently, data centres\ncan introduce 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) or even 40 and 100 GbE as a bandwidth to\nconnect the fastest servers and switches to each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That being said, copper is still a good\noption for horizontal links (10G) and with the new Cat. 8, it will be able to\nprovide 40G for 30 metres. So, it remains cheaper and sufficient for small distances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Density and modularity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With internal data centre traffic expected\nto grow by 80% over the next three years, there is a real risk of networks\nbecoming bandwidth bottlenecks. By moving from traditional low-density cabling\nto high-density structured cable solutions, CIOs can implement physical network\ninfrastructure in a far more flexible manner. These systems enable data centres\nto easily migrate to 25, 40 and 100 Gb\/s networks and solve some critical\nnetwork challenges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automation benefits servers, storage and\nswitches, but the cabling that interconnects it all largely remains a\ncumbersome, manual, error-prone management mess. For this reason, over the last\nseveral years, Automated Infrastructure Management (AIM) has become a strategic\ninvestment for optimising resource usage and cabling documentation in data centres.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AIM eliminates stranded capacity,\nfacilitates end-to-end analysis and agile infrastructure management and aids\npredictive analysis and dynamic infrastructure. Not only this, these solutions\nimprove the efficiency of operation and administration and can result in\nreduction of downtime by 30% to 50%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What issues do CIOs need to understand and address when it comes to cabling? Nabil Khalil, Executive Vice-President of R&M Middle East, Turkey and Africa, explains all. Across industry verticals and organisations of all scales, Digital Transformation is now imperative for business competitiveness. Applications such as social media and Big Data, new architectures such as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":28523,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[105,36,399],"tags":[385,106,164,389,10243,406,10402,1070,1734,776],"class_list":["post-28444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cabling","category-intelligent-technology","category-more-news","tag-africa","tag-cabling-2","tag-cio","tag-digital-transformation","tag-hyperconvergence","tag-middle-east","tag-nabil-khalil","tag-software-defined-networking","tag-software-defined-storage","tag-turkey"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28444"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28524,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28444\/revisions\/28524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}